Action research and postmodernism

C ongruence and critique

Tony Brown and Liz Jones
Open University Press
Buckingham
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Philadelphia
Open University Press
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First Published 2001
Copyright Tony Brown and Liz Jones, 2001
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose
of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
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Road, London, W1P 0LP.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 335 20761 8 (pb) 0 335 20762 6 (hb)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Tony, Ph. D.
Action research and postmodernism : congruence and critique / Tony
Brown and Liz Jones.
p. cm. (Conducting educational research)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-335-20762-6 ISBN 0-335-20761-8 (pbk.)
1. Action research in education. 2. Postmodernism and education.
I. Jones, Liz, 1950 II. Title. III. Series.
LB1028.24 .B78 2001
371.1dc21 2001032138
Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited,
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Emancipation and postmodernism 3
2 Research and the development of practice 13
Part 1 The hermeneutic backdrop: narrating the
researcher 31
3 Creating data in practitioner research 33
4 Transitions: issues of temporality and practitioner research 57
5 On identity 70
Part 2 The postmodern turn deconstructing the
nursery classroom 91
6 From emancipation to postmodernism: a nursery study 93
7 A tale of disturbance 105
8 Identity, power and resistance 116
9 Deconstructing the nursery classroom: that will undo
nicely, but so what? 132
10 Transgressive agents: an optimistic possibility? 150
Conclusion 167
11 Critical pedagogy in a postmodern world 169
Bibliography 185
Index 196
Acknowledgements
This book is the culmination of a project that has spanned some six years.
The project was funded in its entirety by the Manchester Metropolitan
University and the authors are very appreciative of this support. Many
people have contributed signicantly along the way. In particular we would
like to express our thanks to Ian Stronach who has supported us through-
out. We are also indebted to members of the MA in Teaching course team
at the university: Andy Pickard, John Pearce, Una Hanley, John Powell and
Tony Mulligan. We are also grateful to the many teachers who have fol-
lowed the course and made such a strong investment in it. We would par-
ticularly like to thank those who have allowed us to quote their work in
this book: Alistair Bryce-Clegg, Lorraine Dooley, Janice England, Terry Gould,
Steve Grimley, Anna Perry and Mary Savill. At the later stages of preparing
this book Harry Torrance offered some perceptive observations and pro-
vided some very helpful suggestions for developing the manuscript.
We would like to thank journal editors who have allowed us to quote
from earlier articles in Teaching and Teacher Education, Teachers and Teach-
ing, Early Years, Educational Action Research, the British Educational Research
J ournal and Gender and Education. Aspects of the theoretical work on
transition were developed in the context of work for two projects with
Olwen McNamara and Una Hanley, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council project numbers R000222409 and R000223073.
Tony would like to express his appreciation of the support and love
offered by his wife Alison and children Elliot and Imogen.
Liz would like to extend personal thanks to the school where her study
was undertaken. Particular thanks to Kate, who in her position as head
of school always encouraged the research. Special thanks must go to the
children of the nursery. Thanks are also owed to a number of sterling
women, particularly Sue, Seona, Lorna, Abi, Jane and Ruth. Finally,
heartfelt thanks to Kerry, Joseph, Rosalind and Matthew for their love.
Emancipation and postmodernism 1
Introduction
Emancipation and postmodernism 3
1
Emancipation and postmodernism
Failure in emancipatory projects
We shall begin with two anecdotes that highlight the issues we wish to
examine.
Anecdote 1
One day Liz found herself reminding the children about certain
school rules: no running; no hitting. A young girl, Keeley,
responded by saying My mum says that on the street if anyone
hits me Im to hit back. Liz found herself lamely replying, At
school we dont hit. In part, the proffering of such a pat response
comes from not really knowing what to say to the child. In Lizs
nursery and in nurseries generally the discourse of liberal
humanism prevails so that children might become civilized and
rational. It is for these reasons that traits such as caring and
being kind are privileged. Yet in this instance there is a collision
between the messages that the child is bringing from home and
the nursery discourse. Lizs lameness is further compounded as
her response seems to conict with her desire for children to
think critically and to adopt a questioning attitude towards certain
practices including whether rules are appropriate. But on what
basis can one decide what is appropriate? To whom does one
appeal for adjudication?
Anecdote 2
During the early 1980s Tony taught at a large comprehensive
school in London. The school combined a progressive approach
to education with respectability in terms of the student intake it
attracted, its results and attendance levels. This was at the time of
4 Introduction
Ken Livingstones GLC (Greater London Council), when
progressive methods had gained signicant inuence in London
schools generally and in the university education departments
which supplied many of their teachers. In the early 1990s, long
after Tony had left, Ofsted (Ofce for Standards in Education)
went in. They wrote a negative report and declared that nearly a
third of the teachers were unsatisfactory. Perhaps the teaching
force had changed during the intervening years, but more likely
it was the broader conception of what constituted a teacher
that had changed. Such conceptions would appear to be time
dependent. This anecdote in some ways echoes a recent account
by Boaler (1997) in which it was claimed that a school adopting
progressive practices was signicantly superior in its mathematics
teaching when compared to a school that favoured more
conventional practices. Yet later it was the progressive school
that was forced to change its methods after its own inspectorial
visit by Ofsted.
These stories in some ways encapsulate the sort of difculties post-
modernist thinkers have with those assuming a more emancipatory quest
for improvement in educational contexts. Any emancipatory perspective
presupposes values which cannot be agreed upon universally or perman-
ently. If we ght for something we are always working against some-
one elses interests and there are difculties in creating a robustly moral
perspective that will be seen as better by everyone. In saying that we are
working in the childrens best interests, what interests do we mean? The
anecdotes pinpoint the dependency of conceptions of teaching on the
ideological backdrop. Research into teaching, meanwhile, will always be
premised on situationally derived assumptions. And whatever the ndings
of research, in many instances the researcher is unlikely to have the
power or authority to have the nal word.
Moreover, such research draws on an uneasy alliance of two alternative
research perspectives: (a) the insider perspective of teachers focusing on
their own actions; and (b) research motivated by attempts to inuence
policy across broader sections of the teaching force. It may work in my
classroom, and perhaps even in the classrooms of the student teachers I
work with, but it is a different matter making it stick as a national policy.
Further, research agendas are not easily harmonized with conicting
assumptions and motivations held by different agencies, not least those
assumptions built into the infrastructure within which education practices
take place.
This book centres on reexive work being undertaken by practitioner-
researchers in educational contexts. It focuses on what is entailed when
the move is made from common-sense understandings of what it means
Emancipation and postmodernism 5
to be a teacher, to a problematizing about and a careful examination of
the tangled complexities which lie between knowing and doing. In build-
ing this account, we use past and ongoing research activities both from
our own work and from people who have worked with us.
The book explores the notion of the teacher as researcher seen as
the framing of relevant aspects of practice in reective writing which
enables a move from mere description to an understanding of the intri-
cacies of such descriptions. The book also addresses the ways in which
social norms and structures work at coercing these descriptions. Such
an approach, however, has the potential to lead not to the unlocking
of complexity but to the elucidation of rigid preconceptions which serve
only to conrm injustices of the found world. Hitherto, action research
has assumed a reality which can be uncovered and then altered in some
way or improved upon for emancipatory purposes. This however begs
key questions about where our ideas of what counts as improvement
come from. How can the researcher both observe reality as well as
being part of it and thus be implicated in its continual creation and
recreation? These issues are much more complex than action research
has acknowledged so far. We need to move beyond the notion of the
reective practitioner to encompass poststructuralism which attends
more to the way in which we construct reality. Our broader under-
standings of the ow of time, we suggest, are conditioned by the media
through which we receive depictions of it. Newspapers, for example,
create as well as report news. They have considerable inuence over
the way in which information about the present is processed and the
form it has to take to be heard. Such media channels are instrumental
in our everyday construction of the world in which we live. They are
part of the shorthand we all employ in coming to terms with the com-
plexity we face. In research we are in the business of creating a similar
mediating layer with many similar characteristics, and are susceptible
to varying interpretations of its function. Research may be targeted at
nding out how things are, how things work, or be about describing
the world in some other way. But we are always confronted by the
unanswerable question as to whether our language is responsive or
assertive. As researchers, are we saying how things are or telling people
how things should be seen? In constructing validity criteria for our asser-
tions, whose interests are we serving? In particular, what is reected
in reective writing produced within practitioner research? We propose
that we are more than passive recipients of our supposed mirror images,
and that reective writing plays an instrumental role beyond mere
reection.
In this book we draw specically on poststructuralist theories of sub-
jectivity, language and meaning. Because it disputes the notion that lan-
guage is transparent and does not permit either accurate expositions or
6 Introduction
conclusive or denite explanations, poststructuralism allows the reexive
practitioner to see experiences, including those that occur within the
workplace, as open to contradictory and conicting interpretations. Lan-
guage can no longer be relied upon for mastery or control. However, the
book argues that while poststructuralism cannot give the practitioner-
researcher control, it can nevertheless disrupt habitual and mechanistic
ways of being. By adopting poststructuralist frameworks and by engag-
ing with practices of deconstruction, attempts are made to break away
from inappropriate and inadequate category systems.
We write at a time when education generally, but schools specically,
have been the subject of close government scrutiny and where teacher
autonomy has been considerably eroded. We perceive writing this book
as a move towards creating a space where we might articulate something
of what it is to be a teacher. We cannot presume to write what it is to
be a child. What we can do, however, is write our way towards some
understanding of our own complicity and culpability in relations of dom-
inance against those that we would seek to empower. Effectively, this
book is concerned with asking hard questions about our own practices,
especially those which are ostensibly concerned with emancipation.
From emancipation to postmodernism
How then might school-based practitioner research enable us in capturing
and guiding classroom practice? A premise of many teacher research
enquiries undertaken within the context of award-bearing courses is
that reection on practice can lead to a development of that practice.
Such reection, it is purported, enables the practitioner in organizing
the complexity of the teaching situation, with a particular emphasis on
how monitoring change can be converted to control of change. For
the teacher engaged in this style of research there may also be hopes
that the research will result in better teaching as well as a hope that the
children may as a consequence of education have better lives. This
book questions the limits of our capacity to enter into projects of action
(Schtz 1962) as intentional beings in this way, but acknowledges that
we may suppose that we are such intentional beings and act as such.
The book questions the track record of the notion of construing developing
practice as aiming for an ideal. The very desire for control, and the
difculties encountered in trying to document it, can cloud our vision
against the very complexities we seek to capture, trapped as we are in
socially derived constructions of the world we experience. Postmodernist
analysis, meanwhile, offers opportunities to conceptualize the world in
different ways. It insists on undercutting the foundations upon which
notions such as empowerment and enlightenment rest, although some
Emancipation and postmodernism 7
argue that this may not necessarily be a threat to such notions (e.g. Carr
1995). We shall, however, see how our initial attempt at a reconciliation
of the hermeneutic underpinnings of the practitioner research enterprise
with poststructuralist analyses turned into a disruption of the initial
assumptions as to the purpose of research, thus moving away from a
somewhat rationalist focus concerned with effecting productive change
through a systematic process.
The basic task of this book is to examine some of the difculties
encountered when seeking to reconcile a postmodernist style of analysis
with the intentionality ordinarily assumed in practitioner-oriented re-
search enquiry. Much research has been predicated on a modernist project
of the teacher wishing to examine his or her practical relation to the
professional situation they inhabit. Furthermore, this is often motivated
by notions of empowerment both for the children taught and for the
teacher themselves, and as a consequence the research seeks to uncover,
critique and challenge the structural conditions which envelop the pro-
fessional tasks being faced. However, theories of postmodernism and
poststructuralism have impacted on recent work in the eld of educa-
tion, and in very many ways they cut across and work against these
various concerns. The book examines writings produced within a vari-
ety of practitioner research enquiries taking place within the context
of award-bearing courses. It explores the premises upon which such
enquiries are constructed and questions the sorts of resolution that can
be reached.
It would seem that what we are proposing is an unlikely match. On
the one hand there is the notion of the subject who besides being stable
and coherent can use powers of reasoning and rationality in order to
understand the complexities of the world, including those which are
embedded in teaching. This conception of the researcher nds favour
within various examples of practitioner research paradigms. On the other
hand, there is the fragmented subject, with its multiple selves, implied
by poststructuralist theories. Given such incompatibilities, marriage be-
tween the two seems doomed. However, it is not marriage we are pro-
posing. Rather, we perceive ourselves entering into a lengthy engagement
with postmodernism. It is an engagement which nds the practitioner-
researcher situated within the logic which circumscribes such projects.
But, by incorporating theories of postmodernism into the research
practices, we are obliged, we believe, to interrogate that very logic. In
this way we show how the logic is no longer a satisfactory means for
addressing the complexities of social life, including those that are within
the classroom.
The chosen research instrument within this book is reective writing
produced by practitioner-researchers. We suggest that the researcher needs
to be self-consciously reective and thus that they need to be aware of
8 Introduction
their own growth in this process. We prefer to argue for the centrality of
the writing process rather than any supposed research process. It is
through such a writing process we suggest that the researcher asserts
and thus creates themselves. This is rather like the psychoanalysts
client pronouncing from the couch who they are and the things in life
shaping their sense of self. Such assertions or pronouncements provide
frameworks against which we can choose to live our real lives. We thus
understand the task of practitioner research as being targeted at produc-
ing a construction of self in relation to the professional/social context
being faced. (Although most of the research to be discussed in this
present volume is directed at personal and professional development,
such a construction of self may still be implicated in research seeming to
claim a more objective stance.)
We ask how we might proceed in producing and understanding the
reective writing that might arise within such a process. Our premise
is that the practitioner researching in their classroom brings about
perceived changes both through acting in the classroom itself and in
producing writing commenting on this classroom practice. That is to say,
written descriptions of classroom practice, undertaken by the practitioner,
effectively change the reality attended to by that practitioner. The writ-
ing generated in this process can be seen as both responding to past
action and guiding future action. The practical knowledge derived through
such a process is however both dynamic and provisional. In traditional
action research there appears to be a supposition that the researcher
stays the same during the research period. It also often seems that the
world they inhabit stops long enough for them to look at it and then
act. We propose that changes in both researcher and world need to be
documented within the writing process, since they are mutually consti-
tutive. In short, in describing my classroom, I affect the way I see it, thus
the way I act in it, the way I am and hence the way I subsequently
describe it (since it has also been changed by my actions). In engaging
in this circular hermeneutic process, teacher-researchers pass through a
sequence of perspectives, each capable of generating various types of
writing and each susceptible to a variety of later interpretations. How-
ever, this writing becomes detached from the person who generated it. It
becomes a historical artefact susceptible to multiple interpretations as
to its origins and its situation within the social sphere through which
it emerged. While individuals can, if they choose, wed themselves to
understandings of themselves as intentional beings as they act profes-
sionally and write about their actions, such understandings are always
temporary; subject to reformulations and recontextualizations. Research
enquiry can thus be revisited as a historical analysis of practitioners
writing, but a history that creates futures as well as presents and pasts
(see Ricoeur 1984).
Emancipation and postmodernism 9
Chapter outline
The book continues with a development of these issues discussed in
relation to a number of studies being carried out by teachers following
masters and doctoral routes. After a brief review of the critical education
foundations from which our own work springs we offer a more developed
account of the hermeneutic underpinnings that provided the starting
point for our discussion, discussed in relation to some teacher studies.
We then offer a more detailed account of a project carried out by Liz in
a nursery school in which a more poststructuralist analysis is introduced.
We conclude with a discussion of how we might live with a compromised
set of emancipatory values within a more postmodern frame.
Chapter 2 begins with an account of some of the factors shaping the
practice of teachers in school and their associated work on university
courses. It then explores the burgeoning of practitioner research paradigms
within award-bearing courses for teachers and other professionals in
education and the roots of this in the writings of certain key authors
(e.g. Carr and Kemmis, Elliott). Such authors, it is suggested, seem to
presuppose an essence (of a situation or a person) which can be revealed
and improved. These issues will be discussed briey in relation to key
critical pedagogy theorists such as Freire, McLaren and Giroux. A more
developed example is offered relating to feminist conceptions of emanci-
pation. The discussion then introduces the work of Habermas, in so far
as his work might be seen as underpinning contemporary understandings
of emancipatory practice governed by rationalist principles. However,
we then outline how postmodernism rejects the notion of a rational
intentional being centred in a professional situation to be analysed and
modied. We then ask how we might proceed in bringing postmodernist
analyses to approaches presupposing subjects and situations in search of
improvement.
Part 1 considers the hermeneutic underpinning of critical practitioner
research strategies as exemplied in a research masters course for teachers.
It then considers how reective writing might provide an instrument for
loosening the ties of overly rationalist research objectives. Chapter 3
examines how writing produced within school-based practitioner research
can be seen as framing and guiding both classroom practice and the
research process itself. It commences with a discussion of an emancipat-
ory aspect of Habermas work that has been inuential in framing prac-
titioner enquiry in education. It provides a brief account of John Elliotts
Gadamerian objection to this approach in which emancipation is replaced
by evolution. A masters course for practising teachers is described in
which this objection is accommodated. This is based around a model
drawn from Saussurian linguistics for analysing text, widely used by
poststructuralist writers. In this model the meaning of the text depends
10 Introduction
on an evolving relationship between the words within it. An analogy is
drawn with practitioner research, which is characterized as the genera-
tion and analysis of a sequence of pieces of writing whose meaning can
be derived through analysis of the relation between the successive pieces
of writing produced. This model is employed as a framework for under-
standing, monitoring and inuencing changes in practice. Examples of
teachers reective writing from the masters course are used to illustrate
alternative approaches to achieving such writing-led professional change.
Chapter 4 sets out to examine the nature of time and how it is con-
structed within reective teacher research. The chapter is motivated on
the one hand by a belief in evolving identity but on the other it acknow-
ledges a world where such identities are collapsing into interweaving
discourses where notions of such evolution are not tenable. It draws on
the classic debate between Gadamer and Habermas concerned with how
we experience our living in the present, either as a being in the world
or as an end gainer aspiring to a new structural framework within
which life will be unconstrained by reications of oppressive relations.
After questioning the notion of human agency that these views presup-
pose, the chapter pursues a resolution offered by Ricoeur and his sub-
sequent work on the close relation between time and the stories we tell
about it. Some work arising from a masters course for teachers is described
in which attempts are made to reconcile practice with descriptions of
practice. In particular, issues of the teachers working with their own
earlier writings are discussed. It is suggested that such writings can be
used to form a reective/constructive narrative layer that feeds, while
growing alongside, the life it seeks to portray.
Chapter 5 draws on Lacans work in psychoanalysis in seeking to
locate a model for the identity of teachers working on their practice. For
Lacan the human subject is always seen as incomplete, where identica-
tions of oneself are captured in an image: as an individual I am forever
trying to complete the picture I have of myself in relation to the world
around me and the others who also inhabit it. I respond to the fantasy I
have of the Other and the fantasy I imagine the Other having of me. The
mirror image I create of myself is built through successive interpretations
in such exchanges. But these interpretations are in turn a function of
the language we share. In the context of practitioner research, what
version of myself do I feel comfortable with what fantasies do I have
about myself, the place I work, the people I work with and the broader
social context within which this takes place? What story do I tell to justify
my actions? How do I frame my plans and intentions? How do I under-
stand and depict the discourses that interpellate me? What construction
of self is implicated in the models of practitioner research offered so far?
Extensive reference will be made to some writing produced by some
teachers for their nal masters dissertation and subsequent work to
Emancipation and postmodernism 11
illustrate how this psychoanalytical approach might be enacted as part
of a professionally oriented research enquiry.
Part 2 centres on Lizs study based in a nursery classroom in which a
fuller deconstructive unpicking of teacher research practices is offered.
Chapter 6 introduces the conceptualization of the study which brought
the two authors of this present book together. It discusses Lizs work
in a nursery school and her attempts to nd a way of dening the
motivation underlying her own practices as a teacher. It provides an ex-
ample of a transition from an enquiry rooted in emancipatory aspirations
that becomes unstuck, forcing a requestioning of the motivations assumed
at the outset.
Chapter 7 continues to discuss the nursery study and illustrates some
of the repercussions, particularly the advantages, of adopting decon-
structive approaches to those meanings which are brought to an account
of young childrens play within a teacher research enquiry. In describing
and interpreting an example offered here the objective is not to x a
denitive or accurate explanation to it. Instead, the ambition is to dis-
perse rather than capture meanings, to offer multiple and open-ended
interpretations and in so doing disturb the equilibrium of the reported
perspective which gave rise to the account. Through such an approach,
it is suggested, we can challenge ingrained ways of knowing and doing
which inhibit opportunities to question authoritarian ctions present in
the way we often describe the learning of young children, which because
they are habitual and collective, have come to be regarded as natural
and as truths.
Chapter 8 centres on power relations as they are played out within
the context of the nursery. Accounts which centre on the childrens play
are used to illustrate not only how power circulates but additionally
how it might be both resisted or tampered with. Moreover, the writing
illustrates how particular discursive practices have the potential to con-
stitute individuals into particular ways of being. Nevertheless, by taking
up different subject positionings, teacher and child alike can challenge
and render fragile notions of power. It is just such a play of discourses
which this chapter attempts to illustrate.
Chapter 9 takes time out to consider a number of questions includ-
ing: (a) is the practice of deconstructing a responsible act?; (b) should
playing with texts that are themselves concerned with childrens play
be taken seriously?; and (c) can educational research which produces
bafement rather than solutions be considered as research? In her efforts
to address these questions Lizs rst step is to offer a rereading of a boys
game. However, she tries to centre her attention not so much on the
salient features of the game but on those things which are not precisely
present. Such a move provokes different perspectives and it is these
which allow her the possibilities to ask new and different questions
12 Introduction
(Hebdige 1989: 226), a practice which is arguably an act of responsible
research. Her second move is to examine why it is she has what could
be described as a jackboot response to boys play with toy guns. Using
a number of texts which are concerned with gun play Liz picks apart
her own investments in certain ideological positionings. Such aggravations
do not offer a clear-sighted vision as to where to go next. Rather, Liz is
left bafed and it is this which prompts the continual critique of practice.
Chapter 10 concerns itself with notions of agency. Liz takes a brief
exchange between herself and some of the nursery girls. Using this as a
catalyst and working from a Foucauldian perspective she ponders on the
possibilities of individuals becoming transgressive agents.
The Conclusion, Chapter 11, asks whether it is conceivable for the
practitioner to continue to hold on to notions of emancipation when it is
no longer viable to appeal to the old grand narratives, including those of
universal truths, objective science and reason. The chapter assesses the
attempt made in this book to revisit and question the foundations of
educational practitioner research. Taking our cue from Derrida (1994),
we argue that it is possible never to give up on the Enlightenment. But,
as he cautions, this requires re-reading and re-interpreting . . . to raise new
questions . . . disturb stereotypes and good consciences, and to complicate
or re-work for a changed situation (p. 34). By drawing on the authors
base domains of nursery teaching and mathematics education research,
our ambition is to illustrate how different conceptualizations of know-
ledge and understanding can open up the possibility for a changed
situation. We suggest that the narrative product of reexive research
might be seen as the aspirational voice that keeps emancipatory intention
alive. Thus the chapter, through revisiting some of the authors own
specic professional concerns, highlights some of the strategies suggested
for grappling with the complexities of researching educational practice.